Keeper of the Keys (19 page)

I hate you, Kat replied internally. She realized the last time she had been in a hospital was when she went to find Tom there, and eventually found him in the morgue. “An ambulance brought her,” she said instead, helpfully.

“I’m thinking room five oh eight,” he said. “She’s in recovery. Just got there from the OR. Hmm.”

Stop saying that, Kat thought, or I will hit you.

“Through the double doors and on your right.”

She found 508 without too many wrong turns, opened the door, and greeted her sister inside. Raoul, looking like a man holding on to a lifeline, was clasping his wife’s hand with both of his.

Jacki had the window side. On the door side, Jacki’s roommate was a woman who spoke right up. “Arrgh,” the roommate cried in greeting. “Crap! I hate my life!” Thin and pallid as a tubercular character in a novel, she had thrown her white sheets off and lay splayed like an automobile crash dummy, post-collision.

“Hey,” Kat said to her sister.

“Hey.” Jacki’s droopy blue eyes gazed at her. “I know you.”

Scared, Kat just took her hand. Her sister, for the past few months whale-sized, now appeared diminished, the sheet over her stomach collapsed like a fallen parachute. Where was the baby? Kat didn’t dare ask.

Raoul said, “She’s okay, Kat. Really.”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“No time. I’m really sorry. It happened really fast, and then they operated—”

All the pent-up concern Kat had been repressing flooded out and she started crying. “Jacki! Boo hoo hoo.”

“Quit that. Ma always said you sound like a dying animal when you cry and it’s true,” Jacki said groggily. “Ow, Raoul, something hurts bad down by my right foot.”

“She’s doped up, Kat,” Raoul said, apologizing for Jacki’s crankiness. “Just woke up. I’ll get the nurse in here, honey.”

“They doped me up, hoping I won’t notice every freaking thing went wrong that could go wrong.”

Kat said nothing, just squeezed Jacki’s hand.

“Ouch,” Jacki said weakly.

“Sorry,” Kat said. “Tell me what happened.”

“I was crossing Sepulveda. Big street, so many cars. This—oh-so-L.A.—this stretch limo came out of nowhere. What I remember is the part where I rolled along the street like a bowling ball. Speaking of which—” She stared down at her stomach. “Oh, my God! Raoul! Our baby!” She clutched her husband.

Raoul bent down and kissed her forehead. He stayed there, cheek pressed to hers, and whispered, “Honey, you’re a mother.”

“We had—our baby? While I was sleeping?”

He nodded. “You went into labor after the accident, while they were setting your foot. Everything went fine. My brave girl. I love you.”

“The baby came?”

“A boy, sweetheart.”

Kat’s heart filled at the sight of the joy on her sister’s face.

“We have another boy in the family,” Jacki said. Tears glittered in the corners of her eyes. “I want him! Where is he? Bring him here, my darling. Oh, Raoul, a little boy.”

“We can pick a name finally. Anything besides my dad’s, okay?” Raoul said.

“Middle name Thomas.” Jacki tried to sit up, but she groaned immediately and fell back on the bed.

“Congratulations,” Kat said. She smoothed Jacki’s hair and kissed her, then hugged Raoul. “I have a nephew,” she said wonderingly. A new being with an intimate connection to her had sparked into existence when she wasn’t looking.

“But where is he? Why isn’t he here?”

“You need to rest. Are you ready to see him?”

“Please. I am.”

At Raoul’s request, the nurses brought the shriveled and squalling newborn to Jacki, tightly swaddled in a white hospital cotton blanket, a blue band decorating his skinny wrist. Jacki cried at the sight of him. She pulled the tightly wrapped blanket down, which made him cry, too, examining his extremities and genitals.

“They’re perfect,” she said. “Ten toes. Look, Kat. All good.”

“Perfect,” Kat agreed.

Wrinkled and of an alarmingly bright pink hue, he was mostly bald, but Kat was as mesmerized by his velvety pate as Jacki. She reached out a tentative hand and rested it on the downy head. His skin felt moist, warm, and pliant under her touch.

Rather efficiently, the baby found Jacki’s nipple and clamped on. “It might hurt a little at first,” said the nurse. “Of course, you’ll toughen up.”

“Look, Kat. What a beautiful child. Do you believe it?”

“Be glad he’s healthy even though he’s small,” said the nurse. “One lady tonight had a baby with heart problems. He’ll need an operation before he can go home.”

Jacki kissed the baby’s head gently, as if conferring a blessing. “Send her flowers! Send her money for a college education!”

Raoul held her and his son, all together in one big bundle. When Jacki nodded off at last, Kat and Raoul had a wonderful time holding and passing the bundle back and forth and drinking freely from a bottle of chilled champagne Raoul had scored somewhere. The baby slept calmly in his bassinet by the side of the bed, as if perfectly comfortable already with his new surroundings.

“You did it,” Kat said. “You gave me a nephew, Raoul. Thank you.”

He stroked the boy’s cheek, who instantly rooted, searching for a nipple, hoping for more. He sucked his father’s baby finger, temporarily mollified. “What if—imagine me raising him without her. Alone.”

“You would never be alone.”

“I hope that’s true.”

“I might not have the colostrum but I have the will. No harm will come to this one, not when I’m around.” Hearing the fierceness in her own voice made her almost embarrassed.

“I’ll go get us a pizza,” Kat said later. They ate, and Raoul slept, and Kat watched Jacki wake up twice to take pills and feed her little one. The nurses didn’t bother them much. The door was closed and the small, plain room with its medical equipment and sleepers felt as beautiful as the Taj Mahal.

When Jacki woke up again at almost four in the morning and began feeding her baby, Kat left, but not before Jacki had the last word, as usual.

“I wish you could have this feeling,” she said wistfully, “that life goes on, and it’s good.”

She would admit to silver linings, Kat thought, punching the elevator button, new muscles, new life.

Kat had told Ray to pick her up at her work at nine-thirty that evening, but she wasn’t there. Ray missed her. He wanted to talk to her, had been holding on so that he could talk to her.

He looked at his watch again. Too late. She had abandoned him. This pressure in his chest—he had brought the tapes to play for her. They radiated on the seat beside him. He gave up and turned on the ignition, the infernal sound that punctuated all their days and nights.

Ray arrived at Memory Gardens in Brea after the sun sank, the great gardens of the cemetery, their grasses and plaques, immutable no matter what the light. The marker for Henry Jackson reposed in the crematorium. “How we miss him,” the simple script read, then showed dates of his birth and death, the death date close to Ray’s second birthday.

He didn’t believe that death date anymore. His father had died later; he was beginning to feel pretty sure about it.

She hadn’t loved his father. He was beginning to understand why, at last.

He wondered why Esmé had bothered with this memorial marker. She had told Ray his father’s ashes had been scattered by his great-aunt in New York. Maybe she had put it there for him, with a fake death date. She had told him about it years ago, but he couldn’t remember ever coming here with her. Ray had come a few times on his own, during those times when he felt the great pressure about the moves.

She was only trying to protect me, he thought, but I’m a man now. The lying becomes another kind of poison.

He put a bundle of tulips near the marker because there was no place for flowers. He had bought them at a florist just past the off-ramp, bright shiny green leaves with soft curling white flowers at the centers.

“I brought these,” he told the marker, “because it’s a celebration. You’re dead, safely dead, and that’s a blessing, it seems.” He hadn’t cared about his own kid enough to let him grow up in peace. Why had his father terrorized them? Sexual jealousy? He imagined he could guess. He couldn’t let go of a wife, felt insulted when she rejected him. He felt enraged.

Just like Ray had felt when Leigh cheated on him.

He pushed the thought down, and studied the marker.

“You ruined my childhood with your craziness. You made my mother live in fear. We were never free. We lived like outlaws, always running, always afraid, something behind us ready to attack, always catching up.”

He felt the vast emptiness, surrounded by the dead and his own dead hopes. Every boy without a father probably harbors a secret illusion that his father would have been one of the good guys, if only. He’d load up a camper with canned food for trips to Yosemite to climb to Glacier Peak or Alaska to catch halibut, waking his son at five in the morning. Or maybe he would be the guy who dragged his boy off to museums to study the dusty Indian exhibits, who went on and on about the tar pits, and all the groggy boy heard, all the boy had to hear, was his father’s voice, not what he said. All the boy heard was the love.

The time they had together would embed memories so deep, even if the man died, the boy could spend the rest of his lifetime savoring and honoring him.

When Ray had been very young, he had such fantasies. He knew it now because they rushed over him, threatening to drown him. He wondered what his own gravestone might say if Leigh had decided the words.

Ray didn’t even know what kind of work his father had done at the bank. Teller? CEO?

He leaned forward, clearing dust out of the engraved words with a finger. His mother, helped by a hundred scholarships large and small, along with student loans that ran into the tens of thousands, had managed to bring him up and educate him alone, with a baying hound at her heels, always on the lookout.

He owed her so much, everything that had turned out right in his life. Especially his work. Thank her and thank God for it. He loved what he did.

Now Ray had his fine education from Whittier College to fall back on, not to mention graduate school at Yale, which had forced his mother into working two jobs for many years. At least now, he could help her. At least now, she worked because she liked it, so she said, because she liked the people and needed the structure.

Somewhere inside, hadn’t he always suspected he had a bad father? His own badness had to come from somewhere, the fear and anger he had tried to hide from Leigh, from everyone.

“Good-bye, Henry Jackson,” he told his father, turning away. “You bastard.”

15

K
at came home from the hospital before dawn, collapsed onto her couch, and fell asleep. Hours later she woke up ravenous, found some rigatoni, boiled it and added canned sauce, then wolfed down several bites standing at the counter like a pathetic, lonely person.

On the plus side, nobody was around to shame her into a normal breakfast.

Her phone rang. She checked the clock. “Kat here,” she said. “It’s seven-thirty in the morning and you better be calling with good news or else, Raoul.”

“Hiya, it’s me.”

“You’re up at the crack, Zak. I’m not sure I approve.”

“So are you. Or were you sleeping?”

“Well. No.”

“I work out before work. Did we have a date last night? Or was that just magical thinking on my part?”

“We did? We did!” She thought guiltily about also making arrangements with Ray. “But my sister had a baby instead.” She told him about her evening.

“Ah, good. Then it’s not my choice of movie. Or that I wore an ugly shirt or have hair growing on my neck.”

She detected a tentative note she found most gratifying.

“I like you, Zak, although now I’ll have to take a closer look at your neck next time we meet.”

“How are your ankles?”

“Totally recovered.”

“Ah, good. You need those to walk, I’m told. You’re beautiful on skates, by the way,” he said. “Graceful.”

“For someone who trips as much as she glides.”

“You’re just—beautiful.”

Oh, so now, at dawn, he was flirting. She heard a horn. “You’re on your way to work?”

“Yeah, and someone cut me off.”

“So you’re gonna show him?”

“Nah.” He paused. “I moved right and let him win.”

“His SUV’s bigger than your SUV?” she guessed.

“Right.”

“I bet Raoul’s gonna load you up with extra tasks because he has a new baby and you don’t.”

He laughed. “No doubt. So, how about tonight?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? I could come to your place.”

“Probably not. Sorry.” She’d have to reschedule with Ray first.

“So you lied. You did notice the neck hair, didn’t you? You noticed, and now you’ve judged me. You’re thinking, he’s a man who needs a better barber, and that’s not good enough for me.”

“I’m sorry I have to pass on the dinner tonight, Zak. But I swear to God, I am enthusiastic. Soon, okay?”

Her phone getting warm in her hand, she called Jacki at the hospital.

“These places are for sick people, for dying people,” Jacki said. “I want to go home.”

“They’re taking excellent care of you, Jacki,” Kat said, scared at the thought of Jacki coming home with a baby, unable to walk for a couple of weeks.

“Raoul says he can only take a week off. He’s got some gigantic, important, earthshaking business he must attend to after that.”

“My job,” Raoul said faintly in the background.

“He wants to hire someone!” Jacki’s tone was scornful.

Kat said, “Sounds practical to me.”

“I don’t want a stranger in my home.”

Kat took this in, ate another spoonful of rigatoni, and felt a strong desire to hang up. “What are you saying?”

“I have alternatives. Family. You could move in, for example.”

Certainly, she could. She, who had no life to speak of would be absorbed by their vigorously alive family. It was the Buddhist thing to do. Take a leave from work, since Raoul couldn’t. Be good, saintly even. The Buddhists had lots of saints, but they had a hell realm, too.